In this issue:

---

Not In this issue:

---

Notes from the Editor

Just in the nick of time, prolific LB programmer Janet Terra has joined the staff of the Liberty BASIC Newsletter as an editor! Welcome aboard Janet! We are extremely glad to have ya'! Never more will there be a "t" not dotted, or an "i" not crossed. (Or something like that. I always get them confused.)

And now, friends, look what we have in Newsletter 121:

Janet is not only a highly-compensated newsletter staffer, but she has contributed the lead article of this newsletter, The Liberty BASIC Newsletter Index. This is a superb program which allows LB programmers to search an index-database of all LB Newsletters from issue #1 to issue #120! Typical of Janet's programs, the Newsletter Index is both attractive and easy to use. Additionally, if you are intrigued by the versatility of random access files, this submission should be particularly interesting to you. Thanks for your outstanding contribution, Janet!

No sprite repellent required for our next feature, campers, because Alyce Watson's Sprite Bytes™ are fun and friendly! In this edition, Alyce discusses the commands that allow programmers to scale their sprites. Alyce provides two demos with her article, both of which need to be run from your Liberty BASIC root directory on your hard drive. Once again, youse done good, Alyce!

Next up, Bob Bromley provides a very handy demo program for properly handling input that is expected to be numeric input. Bob's cool program contains a function which accepts a string as an arguement. If the string is properly formatted as a number, the function returns the number unchanged. Otherwise, the function will filter out all illegal characters in the string, and return a properly formatted number. Thanks, Bob! That's a good one for the code library!

Following Bob, irrepressible contributor Gordon Sweet provides a pair of interesting demos. In Gordon's Changing the Cursor contribution, Gordon borrows code developed by Stefan Pendl and others to demo the large variety of cursor shapes supported by Liberty BASIC.

In Gordon's second article, he shares a program which provides tips on conversion from QBASIC syntax to LB syntax. Quite useful, Gordon, because for thousands of us, the DOS BASIC languages were the gateways into the GUI BASICs.

Experienced programmer Ken Lewis, Sr. steps forward with a nice modification of the contact manager example program, Contact3.bas that comes with both LB3 and LB4. Ken's program, 1contact.bas provides both new data fields for each contact, and several new data-handling operations, too. Give it a try! (Also note that 1contact.bas requires LB4.)

Last and most assuredly least, Nally provides an article discussing LameCard, a technology for writing Liberty BASIC programs using a card-like metaphor. LameCard technology has two parts: (1) a set of syntactical rules, called LameTalk, and (2) an interpreter which converts LameTalk source code into Liberty BASIC source code. LameCard is still a little bit, well, lame, but the potential exists for the technology to develop into something considerably more interesting. However it develops, forever will I call it LameCard.

***** ***** ***** ***** ***** *****

Well, kids, that's it for this month. And if you'll excuse me, I've got to run to the ol' Frigidaire to slam back a Grape Nehi or two, lest I burn a few circuits. As you know, too much excitement can throw us geezers into mad fits of programming...with Liberty BASIC, of course.

Liberty BASIC Newsletter 121 is now secure. Nally out.

---